Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“THE RELIC” by Jose Maria Eca
de Queiroz (“A RELIQUIA” published 1887; first English language translation by
Aubrey F.G.Bell, published in 1925 – reprinted 1954; second English language
translation by Margaret Jull Costa 1994)
Of
the Portuguese novelist Jose Maria Eca de Queiroz (1845-1900) I have written
before on this blog (see the posting on his domestic comedy Cousin Bazilio). The best-known
Portuguese novelist of the nineteenth century, and possibly of all time, he is
often compared with French nineteenth century realists and satirists such as
Balzac, Flaubert and Zola. His social and political views are fairly clear. He
was a “Liberal” in the nineteenth century sense of the word which, in Portugal,
meant being anti-clerical and in favour of a republic. (The Portuguese monarchy
was overthrown in 1910, ten years after Eca de Queiroz’s death, but the
republic that replaced it was so chaotic that dictatorship followed.) And yet
Eca de Queiroz was too shrewd an observer of life to be a utopian, knowing
full-well that secularist views of the world could be corrupted as easily as
religious ones.
Eca
de Queiroz’s two most overtly anti-clerical novels were written in the earlier
part of his career, The Sin of Father
Amaro and The Relic. Indeed The Relic was probably written in the
early 1870s, when Eca de Queiroz was in his late 20s, but after many revisions
by the author, it was not published until 1887. This is a witty, urbane and
deeply cynical tale, which attacks fanatical religious belief, the worldly
power of the church and false religiosity. And yet, read carefully, it has a
curious subtext which acts as a sort of warning to secularists, who might be a
little too smug and complacent about their own motives.
The
novel’s first-person narrator, Theodorico Raposo, is a sceptic and a rake who
pretends to be pious because his one wealthy relative, his aunt Dona Patrocinio
das Reves, is passionately religious. He hopes to inherit her wealth when she
dies. Theodorico has always found his aunt’s house repellent. In childhood “that great house threw a gloom over me with
its red damask and its innumerable saints and its smell of chapel.”
[Chapter 1] But he goes through the charade of attending mass daily, speaking
of the inspiration that stories of saints give him, repeating phrases he claims
to have heard in sermons, venerating the statues of saints in his aunt’s
private chapel and generally faking intense religious belief. Thus he hopes to
become the sole beneficiary of his childless aunt’s will. Secretly, of course,
he carouses, drinks, seduces women when they are available and keeps a
mistress, Adelia, whom he discovers to be cheating on him.
One
day a priest warns him that he has a rival for his aunt’s inheritance. It is
the church itself, to which she is likely to give everything if he cannot show
irrefutably how pious he is. To his aunt (thinking of the sexual fun he could
have far from Lisbon) Theodorico suggests that he wants to go to Paris to visit
the great churches there. Aunt Patrocinio, however, suggests something more
challenging to him. He is to make a pilgrimage to the “Holy Land” (Palestine –
still part of the Turkish Empire when this novel was written) and bring back
for her the holiest and most powerful relics of Christ that he can find.
So
the novel sets itself up as a comedy in which the rascally libertine writes
pietistic letters to his aunt and seeks out suitable relics; but all the while
chasing women in exotic places, making sardonic comments about the church,
ridiculing Bible stories and generally being a studied hypocrite who hopes his
enacted hypocrisy will bring him wealth.
Even
before he sets off on his pilgrimage, he dreams of being sent “well supplied with gold, to those Mussulman
lands where every step brings one to a harem, silent and smelling of roses amid
the sycamores.” [Chapter 1] Let us say this is an Orientalist view of the
Near East.
In
Alexandria he has an affair with an Englishwoman whose undergarments he keeps as
his own “relic” of sensual pleasure. In Jerusalem he falls in love with another
Englishwoman, and in one episode gets punched out for acting the voyeur through
her keyhole as she is bathing. Jerusalem
he finds to be a place of squalor rather than inspiration, with squabbles
between rival Christian sects around the Church of the Sepulchre. As he says in
the novel’s Prologue: “From the fig-trees of Bethany to the
sleeping waters of Galilee I am well acquainted with the places where dwelt [a] divine Mediator, full of tenderness and
dreams, whom we call Our Lord Jesus; and I found in them nothing but ugliness,
drought, dirt, desolation and rubbish.”
Early
in his journey, Theodorico acquires a pedantic travelling companion, Dr Topsius
from the University of Bonn in Germany. Through this character, Eca de Queiroz
appears to be half-satirising, and half-approving of, the new, often sceptical
German Biblical scholarship that was developing in the nineteenth century,
whereby the “Q” hypothesis of the relationship of the Gospels was devised, and
de-mythologised books such as David Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu were written. While all this might be congenial to
an anti-clerical like the narrator (and the author), Topsius’s flaw is his
national chauvinism. Says Theodorico: “His
pride in his native land was… intolerable. Without ceasing he would lift up his
voice to praise Germany, the spiritual mother of all peoples, or threaten me
with his irresistible force of the German armies. The omniscience of Germany!
The omnipotence of Germany! She reigned in a vast camp entrenched by folios in
which Metaphysics paraded armed and issued the commands.” [Chapter 2]
To
the alert reader, this is a warning that even if Christianity in its Catholic
form can be ridiculed cheerfully, an available alternative view of Christianity
is not necessarily an improvement.
The
story trundles on with the cynic and the pedant viewing, with jaundiced eyes,
places revered by pilgrims. True to the aesthetic paganism that was such a big
thing in Eca de Queiroz’s time, Theodorico has a dream in which the Devil
introduces him to the general history of religions, and notes how joyful people
were under the pagan gods of Greece. Of Jesus, Theodorico therefore remarks: “This carpenter of Galilee had appeared, and
all was over. Men’s faces had become perpetually pale and mortified; a dark cross, crushing
the earth, withered the splendour of the roses and robbed kisses of their
sweetness ; and the new god delighted in ugliness.” [Chapter 2] It’s the
same sentiment that can be found in the poetry of Eca de Queiroz’s contemporary
Algernon Swinburne. Christianity is the enemy of liberating sensuality.
With
much farce intervening, and much satire on the manufacture of relics,
Theodorico finds the one true Crown of Thorns that Jesus wore in his Passion,
and is certain that by delivering it to his aunt he will earn her whole
inheritance. How his hopes are dashed I will not relate here, knowing how
irritating “spoilers” can be. I will say that the farcical circumstance that is
Theodorico’s nemesis is a fairly obvious one (I had a fair idea of what was
going to happen when the novel was only half done). I will also note that, as
in Cousin Bazilio, Eca de Queiroz
does not end his narrative where we expect him to. It plays to the irony of
disappointed hopes and unexpected outcomes.
More
crucial to the novel’s overall effect, however, is the novel’s third chapter
which some have interpreted as an annoying interruption to an onward-moving
narrative. For myself, I see it as the heart of the novel’s ideas. Taking up
one third the length of the novel, Chapter 3 consists of a long vision (or
dream?) in which Theodorico, accompanied by Dr Topsius, is whisked back to
Jerusalem in the last days of “Rabbi Jeschoua” (i.e. Jesus) and beholds his
condemnation, passion, and death. The tone here is very like Anatole France’s
famous sceptical story The Procurator of
Judea or for that matter George Moore’s sceptical Jesus novel The Brook Kerith. (Sceptical fictions based
on scripture were fairly common in the late nineteenth century – see on this
blog the posting Biblical andSceptical-Biblical Novels).
As
in much pseudo-Biblical fiction, there are in the “vision” many descriptions of
marketplaces thronging with ployglot crowds, the splendour of Roman palaces
etc. But the focus is on Jesus, who is presented as the reformer of a corrupt
religious establishment. Sometimes he is naïve – in cleansing the temple of its
money-lenders, he renders destititue many poor people whose only livelihood is
selling trinkets. (This depiction of a Christ-figure who is not worldly-wise
enough to foresee the consequences of his actions reminded me very much of Luis
Bunuel’s film Nazarin.) The message
Jesus preaches is one of universal brotherhood and social equality. He is
pitted against the malign authoritarian power of Jehovah as preached by the
Pharisees. Of course there is no Resurrection – Jesus is drugged by friends
when he is on the cross (the sponge with the vinegar…) so that he can be
deposited in the tomb in a comatose state and then be revived by natural means.
However, after this, he dies of his wounds… but the sentimental Mary Magdalene
insists that he is still living among them. If you know your anti-clerical nineteenth century narratives
of Jesus, you will recognise this as a crib from Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jesus, which (doubtless to the
ire of many feminist nuns I have known) emphasised that Mary Magdalene was the
first witness to the Resurrection because only a woman would be emotional and
sentimental enough to believe such a tale.
In
the novel’s pay-off, after Theodorico’s hopes for an inheritance have been
dashed, he is able to interpret Christians such as his aunt as the ultimate
betrayers of Jesus’ simple messsage. They are, in effect, the new Pharisees.
Addressing Christ, Theodorico considers the crucifixion and says “on that day… Auntie and all those who now
prostrate themselves at your feet would have hooted at you as did the sellers
of the Temple, the Pharisees and the rabble of Acra…. The proprietors who now
lavish on you gold and feasts of the church, would have joined forces, with
their arms and codes and purses, to put you to death as a revolutionary, an
enemy of order, a danger to property…” [Chapter 5]
So
this is a simple anti-clerical fiction delivered as farce…. Except that it
isn’t. After all, we know that the man narrating the story is a scoundrel, liar
and hypocrite, and after his hopes have been dashed, after he has hurled his
anathemas against his aunt and the church, he proceeds to make his way in the
world by the very means that he has condemned. Yes, he resolves to speak more
forthrightly – but like other men of his class and time, he plays the game of
public piety and private libertinism to get ahead in the world. Eca de Queiroz has the wit to see that
Theodorico’s achieved wisdom does not make him morally a better man – only a
more cunning one.
The
satire of this novel is two-edged.
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